Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko has opened up on the ‘very complex’ fuel pump issue that forced Max Verstappen to retire from last weekend’s Australian Grand Prix, which was eventually won by Charles Leclerc of Ferrari. Verstappen looked set to claim a second-placed finish and plenty of valuable points until he was struck by a race-ending mechanical problem as the 58-lap contest grew into its closing stages on the streets of Melbourne.
The incident marked Verstappen’s second retirement in just three races, with the Dutchman slipping to sixth place in the Drivers’ Championship standings as a direct result of this year’s reliability issues. Marko has since revealed that Red Bull have identified the problem and discovered that it was entirely different from the fuel pump failure that ended Verstappen’s hopes of victory at the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix.
“We have a tough task ahead of us,” Marko told Speedweek in the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s race in Australia when quizzed on what went wrong for Verstappen.
“We were able to clarify the cause of the fuel leak in Max’s car. The matter is very complex. The problem is absolutely different from that of Bahrain.”
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Verstappen had been running in second for the vast majority of the race in Australia and even came close to snatching the lead after a safety car restart before he was eventually forced to retire on lap 38. The 24-year-old will be desperately hoping for Red Bull to have successfully addressed their lack of reliability by the time F1 returns to Imola for next weekend’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.
The chequered flag was taken by Verstappen in last year’s event but the Red Bull man will simply be hoping to complete all 63 laps at the next time of asking in order to make it to the finish line without being stopped by any new mechanical failures. He recently insisted that he will not stand any chance of defending his Drivers’ Championship title if Red Bull are unable to put things right as a matter of priority over the coming weeks and months.
“We are already so far down in the championship that from now onwards, basically you first need to be faster than them [Ferrari], which we’re not, and zero problems with the car which we also don’t have,” he said after his latest retirement in Melbourne.
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“So it’s going to be a big task. It was just a terrible race, just no pace. I couldn’t push because the tyres were just getting destroyed.
“Today in general was just a bad day again. Not really having the pace, I was just managing my tyres to try and just bring it to the end because it looked like quite an easy P2 anyway.
“I knew I could not fight Charles, so there was no point in trying to put pressure on him. But we didn’t even finish the race so it’s pretty frustrating and unacceptable.”
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